Charlie Bamforth

By way of either a little light relief or as education, the guest speaker spot at the CAMRA's Annual Conference is eagerly awaited by most of us that attend this august gathering. This year I was particularly thrilled when I found it to be Charles Bamforth, Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Malting and Brewing Sciences at UC Davis University of California.  He is also  British and has much experience of brewing here, mostly as a Senior Quality Assurance Manager at Bass Brewing.

Now I have known of Charlie for many years and was in fact given a book of his by a good American friend of mine as long ago as 1999.  That book, Tap Into The Art and Science of Brewing is my technical bible. I know from industry sources and my friend (Jaime Jurado, Director of Brewing Operations at Abita Brewing Co and formerly a brewer at Truman's in Brick Lane, London) that Charlie is one of the leading experts in CO2 in beer and in what bubbles do and don't do. He knows his stuff.  I rarely if ever get too involved in any technical debates in my blog or elsewhere, as you tend to be a hostage to fortune in such things and I sometimes at least don't feel secure enough to go into technical matter too deeply, but if I do, I check out the "bible" before doing so.  You can imagine then I was delighted to have the chance to hear Charlie speak.

He obviously has a practised act, honed to a very sharp point by use and his very funny and amusing speech was delivered with timing that a professional comedian would have been proud of.  He took the mickey out of wine and its pretentiousness,  had a very positive view of cask beer which he declared to be without equal when done well and generally anecdoted his way through a very entertaining half hour. He also (to my surprise in some ways) expressed a dislike for nitrogenated beer. It was an interesting speech as well as a very entertaining one. There was time for questions at the end before he whizzed off and I was lucky enough to catch the Chairman's eye and be allowed to ask one.  My chosen subject was about deliberate turbidity in beer. London Murky in other words.  Essentially his answer was that while a little haziness might be forgiven, there is no excuse for beers that look like "chicken soup."

Good enough for me. If Charlie is agin it, I'm on his side. If you dispute this, write to Charlie, not me. He'll put a(kindly) flea in your ear I'm sure.

Jaime is a bit of a whizz at the old dispense too. I remember being invited to Porterhouse in London by him when he had sorted out some fobbing issues for them.

Regretfully Charlie was gone immediately after his speech, so I didn't get a chance to talk to him.  Great shame that.

Brewing Velvet Pilsner Lager

I was brewing beer in London recently with Pilsner Urquell. Martyn Cornell has already set out the background and detail of why we were all gathered in the White Horse at Parson's Green here, so I urge you to read his blog first (good advice at any time - for example, his piece on supplying beer to the troops after D Day is superb).  He gives all the detail, so, keen on avoiding hard work as I am, I won't do it all again here.  Thanks Martyn.  I owe you a pint.

A quick recap though of the mission. In the upstairs room at the White Horse, six teams -  three a day over two days all to brew a lager beer based on the Pilsner Urquell recipe.  The aim is to tweak, or indeed utterly change the PU recipe and produce a beer to be judged later. The winning beer to be brewed commercially by Windsor and Eton Brewery.  So big stakes and a very serious brew-off punctuated by a lot of fun.  Throughout the day we had superb advice from Václav Berka PU Senior Brewmaster, Paddy Johnson of Windsor and Eton Brewery and from Greg Tucker, a taste psychologist, who was with us from the beginning and whose insight into tasting was for me one of the highlights of a day of highlights.  Think you know about taste? Think again.  He was brilliant both in content and delivery.

Now I'm no home brewer, but I like to think I know enough about the processes not to make a fool of myself, so our little team - thrust together absolutely randomly - first all determined that none of us were home brewers - or indeed any other kinds of brewers.  So we had an even non brewing playing field and hopefully not too many preconceptions. We had though all listened carefully to the pep talk by Václav and another by Paddy and fortunately all of us had taken the same main message out of it "Less is more."  We decided at that point that our recipe would be a tweak, not a complete re-write.

The water - brought from Pilsen was already being boiled - so we (Canadian Presenter and Filmmaker Nate Nolan, Norwegian writer Line Elise Svanevik from In a Pub Magazine (who incidentally sounded as Norwegian as I do), Neil Walker, Blogger and National Press Officer at CAMRA and me) started thinking about malt.  PU is brewed with 100% pilsner malt.  We decided that we wanted something with more mouthfeel, so we substituted some melanoidin malt and just a touch of Munich to again add richness and also to add a touch of colour which in PU is provided by triple decoction.  Not something we could do.  That decided, it was into the boil.  For those that like detail; 3.9kg Pilsner Malt, 325g Munich Malt and 75g Melanoidin Malt went in and a lot of hot and sticky stirring ensued.

The hops discussion was much livelier and longer lasting.  PU is hopped solely with Saaz, but after much sensual rubbing, sniffing, oohing and aahing, we decided on an all Czech hop bill.  Currying favour? Us? Certainly.  So we had 40g Saaz in the initial boil, 20g of Agnus five minutes from the end and 40g of Kazbek (which we all really loved) to provide aroma at flame out.  Sounds good?   We thought so.  We ended up more or less where we wanted to be with an OG of 1048.6.  21 litres in all.  The wort tasted good. Much as we'd hoped, with good bitterness under all the sweetness and distinct lemon and spice.  The worts were then chilled and the yeast pitched before being taken away to London Beer Labs for fermentation and lagering. 

Of course all breweries have to have a name and ours was Four Corners (as in the four different countries of the world our team hailed from) and the beer was named Velvet Pilsner after the Velvet Revolution that separated the Czech Republic from Slovakia. Everything had been thought of and we even had on hand a design artist who pulled together a remarkably good label from our very vague and unformed thoughts. Regrettably I didn't take a photo of that!

 The resulting beers will be bottled for judging in July.  I can't wait.  I'll be there biting my nails, but we are all quietly confident. 

 We were also treated to copious amounts of Tankovna unpasteurised Pilsner Urquell, poured mainly by Václav himself.  It is a cracking, complex beer.  My thanks to Pilsner Urquell UK and to Mark Dredge for the invitation to a fascinating day.